Mixed Race Studies

It’s a wonderful, mixed-up world

The Daily Telegraph
2009-11-01

Aarathi Prasad

There are now more mixed-race children than ever before—and that is something for us all to celebate, says the scientist Aarathi Prasad

Just two weeks ago in Louisiana, an American Justice of the Peace made international news for refusing to issue marriage licences to couples who were not of the same race. He said he had taken the decision because he believed that mixed-race children would not be accepted by their parents’ communities. Whether this was genuine concern for a real social problem or was born of a more atavistic notion that there is something inherently, biologically wrong with mixing races, we can only speculate. Either way, his position was quite illegal, and his conduct is being challenged.

The sentiment, however, is one that is also shared much closer to home. Nick Griffin, the chairman of the BNP and a member of the European Parliament, has made his party’s stance on mixed-race children clear. Miscegenation, he says, is “essentially unnatural and destructive”, and mixed-race children “are the most tragic victims of enforced multi-racism”. The BNP says that it does not, nor will it ever, “accept miscegenation as moral or normal.”

As a person from the Indian ethnic minority in this country, I am sorry to say that I am familiar with this attitude. The most recent census in England and Wales found that people from my South Asian background were the least likely of the minorities to be married to someone from a different ethnic group.

Our relatively low inter-marriage rate might be explained by our cultural as well as racial differences, and our predilection for holding tightly to our caste systems and religions. When someone like me chooses a partner of another race, some family member is guaranteed to ask the same question as that Louisiana Justice of the Peace: “But what will the children be?”

I can answer that question now. The answer is that my daughter, and approximately 400,000 other children like her in Britain today, is mixed race. Families like mine are on the rise – nearly one in 10 British children now lives in a mixed-race family, a figure that is six times higher than it was when I was a child. In fact, mixed race people are the fastest-growing minority in this country, a trend that is set to continue. Even in my community, traditionally inward-looking when it comes to choosing partners, the proportion of mixed marriages has increased from 3 per cent to 11 per cent in the space of just 14 years…

…But the combination of inbreeding being bad and diversity being good has flung open the doors for another claim about what it means to be mixed-race. The idea sounds simple enough. If inbreeding is bad, then the opposite – outbreeding – should be good. It makes sense, some suggest, that people might be genetically better off if they were mixed race. The anecdotal evidence is writ large in the over-representation of Britain’s tiny mixed-race population in the arts, music, modelling and sport. Mixed-race people account for 30 per cent of the current England football team in a country where they make up only 2 per cent of the general population…

Read the entire article here.